A look at Pro Tour Tokyo, but first a personal note.

I have been away from Magic for a couple months now, and some interesting things have happened since I last cast a spell:

Kamiel Cornelissen showed that he is a rising star on the Pro Tour with three great finishes in a row including back to back top 8's.

The Ferrett won a PTQ for Barcelona, fulfilling his guarantee that he would qualify within a year ahead of schedule. Let's see if he can hold his own on the tour. (He won't - The Ferrett)

Chris Benafel, Ryan Fuller, and Noah Boeken put up some impressive individual finishes and came together to win the Team Masters tournament in Tokyo. Their success has been well earned, but there was a little bit of personal irony for me: My very first match ever at a Pro Tour was at a team event against Boeken and his Dutch teammates. I had never heard of any of them and was confident of winning - but Boeken and his Sanctum Custodian x2, Zephid x2, and sideboard Absolute Law was too much for my R/G deck to handle.

Two Pro Tours in a row were won by friends of mine from New York City. Not only that, but they both are Neutral Grounders and former Columbia University students. (my alma mater)

I read about all these events from the outside, having set Magic aside to pursue personal and business ventures. During my hiatus I found myself missing the thrill of competition and thought I would satisfy it by hanging out and money drafting at a local PTQ (I wasn't able to make it by 10 a.m. to play in the main event). My skills were a little rusty and I made a subtle misplay that probably cost us the draft. It was a reminder that limited is quite practice intensive and if I wanted to compete on a high level I would have to find the time to play regularly. Seeing my peers succeed gave me a little bit of extra motivation to give Magic another shot. My work schedule remains busy, but I am starting to play again and refamiliarize myself with the game. The test for how successful my "comeback" efforts are will be when the PTQ season starts again.

I was intrigued by the format for PT: Tokyo. It was new and unestablished and there wasn't anything clearly broken to exploit. It was the kind of format where subtle, underused cards and clever tricks could take you far. I wasn't playing Magic during the time when people were testing, but I made a couple of decks a week or two before the tour that I thought were interesting:

R/G
4x Fires of Yavimaya
4x Thornscape Familiar
4x Kavu Aggressor
4x Flametongue Kavu
4x Kavu Monarch
4x Kavu Titan
2x Raging Kavu
3x Ghitu Fire
3x Urza's Rage
4x Shivan Oasis
12x Mountain
12x Forest

My reasoning was that Fires was so good in standard that it had to be viable in block. I guessed that the successful block constructed R/G decks wouldn't use dedicated mana acceleration, instead relying on a good land base. In type 2 with Birds and Elves, you can play eight accelerators, about twenty-six lands, and only twenty-six real spells because the spells are all such bombs. I don't think you have powerful enough cards in IBC to get away with so few spells. The other issue is that the various mana elves and Utopia Tree cost two, so with an ideal draw you are still playing Fires on turn 3 and don't start attacking until turn 4. Kavu Monarch might be a silly choice, but he could present your opponent with an unpleasant dilemma. Not only do your numerous Kavu pump him up, your opponent could be forced to play their Kavu and power your Monarch! An ideal draw with this deck is still pretty brutal: Turn 3 Fires, Turn 4 Monarch, Turn 5 Flametongue Kavu - and suddenly your opponent is staring down eight power and the burn spells start to get dangerous.

I wanted to examine the differences between this untuned, lightly tested version and the R/G deck that dominated Tokyo. I think the Sideboard did a great thing by publishing every decklist that was used at the Pro Tour. It gives one a helpful tool to see what was successful and what wasn't, and lets you see the exact lists of some of the rogue decks that you might not ever see otherwise. Here is the deck Ryan Fuller won FOURTEEN straight matches with before losing a near-mirror match in the quarterfinals:

Ryan Fuller
r/g
10x Forest
1x Keldon Necropolis
9x Mountain
4x Shivan Oasis

4x Blurred Mongoose
2x Flametongue Kavu
4x Kavu Titan
4x Raging Kavu
4x Skizzik
4x Thornscape Battlemage
4x Thornscape Familiar
2x Yavimaya Barbarian
4x Ghitu Fire
4x Urza's Rage

There is a lot of talk about how team Alpha Beta Unlimited broke the format with this deck. It is hard to argue with the great results they posted, but what exactly are the differences between my homebrew and this deck?

One is that the mana curve is lower in this deck, which allows Ryan to play fewer lands. His deck can fight a tempo battle much better with more two drops. The Blurred Mongooses are a great metagame inclusion. Not only are they fast early damage, but they dodge all of the cheap removal that abounds in the format, from Terminate to Ghitu Fire to Repulse or Recoil.

Essentially, this is an aggressive deck that puts out quick, difficult to answer threats and if those don't finish the job Skizzik, Ghitu Fire, or Urza's Rage will. None of the team who ran this deck maindecked four Flametongues and hardly anyone in the whole tournament played a Fires, which I thought were both automatic four ofs. It turned out that the best creatures in the block aren't efficient enough to warrant spending a turn casting Fires (such as Blurred Mongoose) or they already have haste like Skizzik or Raging Kavu. The ABU deck also addressed some finer points of the metagame. While my deck could be crippled if the opponent plays a protection from red creature, this deck has good answers in the trampling Skizzik, the Acolyte-smashing Thornscape Battlemage, and simply much greater early pressure that might allow you to burn the opponent out. Congrats to the team for developing a deck that took advantage of the strengths of the cardpool and was a step ahead of the other decks in the field.

Just for fun, here was the other deck I built pre-Tokyo:

B/R
4x Pyre Zombie
4x Void
2x Yawgmoth's Agenda
4x Breath of Darigaaz
4x Terminate
4x Ghitu Fire
4x Urza's Rage
2x Soul Burn
4x Urborg Volcano
4x Chromatic Sphere
10x Swamp
10x Mountain
4x Star Compass

I think that this is an okay build, but it's too controllish compared to the R/B and R/B/x decks that did well at the Pro Tour. I was missing Skizzik from both the decks I made and that is one of the best cards to quickly go on the offensive once you have stabilized the board. Breath of Darigaaz was virtually ignored at the Pro Tour, which surprised me a little bit because it is fairly efficient at sweeping away ground creatures and is an efficient answer to the Mongoose. One thing I disagree with in this style of deck is using Nightscape Familiar to facilitate casting spells. It is a wonderful card, IF you get to take full advantage of it, in that it accelerates you while providing a regenerating ground blocker. Most of the time, however, you want to cast your Familiar on turn two, when you won't have regeneration mana available. Most decks have ways of killing a Familiar early in the game and then you lose your tempo advantage. Star Compass provides about the same mana acceleration, and is much less vulnerable. The Familiar might save you two or more mana a turn if you are casting multiple spells - but on the other hand, Star Compass helps you cast all your spells, not just certain colors. Theoretically, it might be good to get the mana savings and a creature to boot. More frequently than not, that 1/1 body is a liability (in that it can be killed) rather than an asset. The green Familiar stands on its own merits a little bit better in that it at least has two power and can be an effective attacker.

And then we have the Pro Tour winning deck. I don't have much to comment about that except to say that it was a brilliant metagame deck that I don't know if I would have had the guts to play. Of course, looking out into the sea of Flametongue Kavus, Skizziks, Urza's Rages and Ghitu Fires they were probably happy about their decision. By the way, this is the second time that the Zvi Mowshowitz / Scott Johns led team played the deck that won the whole thing but not the most successful deck overall. The last time was at the rebel dominated Pro Tour New York where Sigurd Eskland won with the team's Rising Waters deck. The Masters Series in Barcelona will use the same format as Tokyo and it will be interesting to see what the top players in the game come up with when they use the same tools in a more defined field.